[FFmpeg-devel] transcoding on nvidia tesla

[Mike Melanson]

M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> "Dan Khasis" <dan at novapulsar.com> writes:
> 
>> I can make a significant contribution to get this going, and purchase a card
>> or two for development testing.
>>
>> When it comes to converting thousands of videos per second/minute on one or
>> two teslas, versus 10,000 servers across 10 datacenters, using kilowatts of
>> power, the costs associated with several of these servers become irrelevant.
>>
>> I guess the real question is if it's possible, how long it would take, and
>> how much I would have to contribute :)
>>
>> Based on my understanding of how well the developers of ffmpeg, have made
>> ffmpeg the de facto video conversion application, I think it's safe to say
>> they can do this too.
>>
>> With a tesla or two, you could be transcoding thousands of HD streams
>> simultaneously.
> 
> I doubt the performance boost would be as big as you suggest.

I think the belief -- partially driven by the marketing material -- is
that, since one of these cards has 128 thread processors, it should be
able to run 128 concurrent instances of FFmpeg and encode 128 HD videos
simultaneously. There must be some parts of, e.g., the H.264 encoding
process (which, as we know, does not live in FFmpeg) that could take
advantage of parallelization. Of course, there's still the overhead of
little matters like bitstream syntax encoding and file muxing.

-- 
	-Mike Melanson